Tragic Magic: (Of the Diaspora - North America)

INTRODUCTION

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THE CONSUMMATE SHORT-STORY WRITER Grace Paley once said that, more often than not, the only thing coming with publication is silence. She, no doubt, meant that even glowing reviews from mainstream arbiters of culture, such as the New York Times, did not guarantee a substantial number of readers who would buy the book. This was my experience when my first novel, Tragic Magic, was published by Random House in the fall of 1978 and received enthusiastic reviews, particularly in the Sunday New York Times Book Review, but did not translate into sales. However, I felt enormously fortunate to have been one of the numerous African American writers that Toni Morrison guided to publication in the 1970s, during her many years as a senior editor at Random House.

I’ve thought a great deal about Paley’s comment regarding the deafening silence that often greets publication since McSweeney’s contacted me regarding their desire to republish my first novel. But what I’d like to revisit is not the silence in the aftermath of publication, but the presence of sounds, spoken and instrumental, that informed and continue to animate my experience of writing fiction.

The sounds of my mother and father’s voices, the conversations overheard among aunts and uncles, the gossip between my sister and her girlfriends, and the lively barbershop talk are imprinted on nearly every page of Tragic Magic. There was also rhythm and blues and jazz that was baked into my nervous system.

I was reminded of this when rereading the opening of Tragic Magic: A Few Words Before the Get Go. The narrator identifies with the improvisational approach of jazz musicians and decides to tell his story by …play(ing) against the melody, behind and ahead of the beat, to bend, diminish, and flatten notes, and slip in and out of any exact notation of what and how I should play. The narrator mentions Ella Fitzgerald as an influence, who was …one of the foremost practitioners of the form of talking shit known as scatting. With the air as her scratch pad she has scribbled much syllabic salad into song. The protagonist also makes reference to his aunt (based on one of my own) who, when arguing with her husband, used a difficult-to-decipher slang called Tut and inserted it into her opposition to him. And in keeping with the transgressive lingo of Tut, the narrator, at the end of the introduction, says, Like all of the rest before me I seem doomed to dissonance and thoughts like highwater pants that are too far from where they’re supposed to be.

Ironically, I wrote all this after the novel was completed, which could not have been written while I was discovering what I was writing and how it would sound. I was then persuaded to move it to the beginning, since the narrator could only have acquired this greater clarity about his journey once he’d finished telling his story.

The relationship between the inventiveness of Black idiomatic speech and the improvisational impetus of American jazz are the voices in Tragic Magic that recount the story of a young Black man coming to terms with definitions of masculinity that have shaped him and persist even after two years in prison for refusing to serve in the armed forces during the war in Vietnam. Although the experiences of the protagonist, Melvin Ellington, mirrored many of my own, I had (to paraphrase artist Ben Shahn) to find a form that would shape my subject matter. And while I possessed some fragments of the story I thought I wanted to tell, I found myself following the approach of jazz great Miles Davis (on his legendary 1959 record Kind of Blue) and groundbreaking comedian Richard Pryor, who took a not fully worked out composition or stand-up performance, and riffed on some of their ideas to see where they would lead them.

During the writing of Tragic Magic and anything I’ve written subsequently, I am never without the rejuvenating sounds embodied in the human voice and their equivalent in music. Like any serious writer, I want to be read. But the silence in response to the publication of my novel was, for the most part, out of my control. What I could control, and ultimately of more value to me, are the voices telling me stories that, like Toni Morrison, I want to read. And like her, I continue to try to write them.

—WESLEY BROWN

A FEW WORDS

BEFORE THE GET GO

AS AN INTERN IN the reed section of sound I have been bucking to win the critic’s poll as a talent deserving wider recognition. I know all the standards and am particularly adept at playing the immortal To Get Along, You Go Along. But there are times when in spite of myself I undermine the popular rendition by not playing it as it was written, and flirt with the tragic magic in If, Maybe, Suppose, and Perhaps. When this happens I flash on my namesake, Duke Ellington, and recall what one of his mentors, Dad Cook, once told him: Learn the rules, then forget them and do it your own way. More than once this advice has subverted my best intentions to go along with the program. So at auditions to enter the fold I get the urge to play against the melody, behind and ahead of the beat, to bend, diminish, and flatten notes, and slip in and out of any exact notation of what and how I should play.

I studied up on my problem and discovered it was quite a common affliction. The legendary New Orleans cornet player Charles Buddy Bolden exhibited the same symptoms and was committed to a state hospital in 1907. After a routine examination, a doctor, S. B. Hays, gave his assessment of Bolden’s condition.

Accessible and answers fairly well. Paranoid delusions, also grandiosed. Auditory hallucinations and visual. Talks to self. Much reaction. Picks things off the wall. Tears his clothes…. Looks deteriorated but memory is good…. Has a string of talk that is incoherent. Hears voices of people that bothered him before he came here.… Diagnosis: Dementia praecox, paranoid type.

I went to a chili house in Harlem where it is said that ideas going through boot camp in Charlie Parker’s head resulted in his finding a metaphor inside old chord changes that no one had heard before.

I remember one night before Monroe’s I was jamming in a chili house on Seventh Avenue between 139th and 140th. It was December, 1939. Now, I’d been getting bored with stereotyped changes that were being used all the time… and I kept thinking there’s bound to be something else. I could hear it sometimes but I couldn’t play it. Well, that night, I was working over Cherokee, and, as I did, I found that by using higher intervals of a chord as a melody line and backing them with appropriately related changes, I could play the thing I’d been hearing. I came alive.

—CHARLIE PARKER

According to those present, Bird’s playing started everyone in the joint to jumping giddy and yapping in a strange tongue that emphasized the buzzing sound of the letter Z. It started when someone said—

Kiss my ass! And the comeback was—

That don’t make me no nevermind cause eee-it-tiz neee-iz-zot the beee-iz-uuuteee, eee-it-tiz the bee-iz-zoooteee!

Bird wailed on at the top of the chords, and the Z string rap spread its healing and hurting potential all over Seventh Avenue. Over the years so-called buzz talk became the most popular street lingo and the most difficult for outsiders to decipher.

Many dismissed Bird. They said he played jujitsu music and was not only out to lunch but should be fitted for the wraparound dinner jacket. Before Bird left the scene he produced many moments of improvisational bliss. It is rumored that one night at Birdland he played the standard You Go to My Head, and had everyone within the sound of his horn on their knees attempting to entertain other ways of going to someone’s head.

Scatology is a branch of science dealing with the diagnosis of dung and other excremental matters of state. Talking shit is a renegade form of scatology developed by people who were fed up with do-do dialogues and created a kind of vocal doodling that suggested other possibilities within the human voice beyond the same old shit.

Ella Fitzgerald has been one of the foremost practitioners of the form of talking shit known as scatting. With the air as her scratch pad, she has scribbled much syllabic salad into song. Once during a concert in Berlin Ella forgot the words to Mack the Knife, but bullskated her way through it with some bodacious makeshift palaver. After her performance she was declared the official voice of the Land of Oooh Blah Deee, traveling air mail special and postmarked from now on.

I have an aunt and uncle who love to go at it. Their battles are reminiscent of the carving contests that went on between musicians during the early days of jazz in New Orleans. Once when they were on the outs, my uncle refused to engage my aunt in any verbal slugging. She was so angered by her unanswered challenges that she began badmouthing him in some strange talk she called Tut. Not knowing what she was saying about him roused my uncle back into combat. Their jam sessions were restored in the best New Orleans tradition, which trumpeter Mutt Carey described as a battle where if you couldn’t blow a man down with your horn, at least you could use it to hit him alongside his head.

Once during a show at the Apollo the headliner tried to chump the audience off by playing bad imitations of the imitators of his own work. But a woman in the balcony wasn’t going for it and let him know about it: All right, now! Let’s have some interpretation!

This type of ensemble playing rises from the streets of my life like a herd of elephants running off at the mouth. A space opens up where I can take my solo. I open up considering a fish ‘n chips joint across the street. Now, some folks hold to the notion that fish were made for the dish and let the chips fall where they may. But just maybe, as a side-order argument, fish were made to swim free and let the chips fall where they can best get a play. There I go again. More rowdy blank verse. Like all the rest before me I seem to be doomed to dissonance and thoughts like highwater pants that are too far from where they’re supposed to be.

SOME YEARS AGO I was on the subway with a woman I’d taken out. Her name was Tonya. We hadn’t known each other very long but with the rocking train nudging us into one another, I was beginning to get a contact high. At the far end of the car the door slid open and a dude came through, moving like a lean sapling in the wind. As luck would have it, he sat directly across from us, and immediately began giving Tonya the onceover. When he had scoped enough he got up and stepped over to where we were. After a short inspection of the subway map above us he leaned down and began whispering into Tonya’s ear. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but whatever it was she shook her head to all of it. After the dude whispered his piece and went back to his seat, I wondered what was going on in Tonya’s head. Had he insulted her? And if so, did she expect some act of chivalry on my part? The thought made my bones quiver.

The dude started smiling at Tonya again, giving off a lot of sly action around the corners of his mouth. Maybe she felt it wasn’t her place to let on that anything was wrong. It was clear to me at that moment that I was neither knight nor noble, so there was no point in even thinking I could put a royal ass-whipping on anybody. Keeping all this in mind I leaned over to her, raising my voice above the roar of the train.

Let’s move to the front of the train. It’ll be closer to the exit.

She nodded and we got up, moving unsteadily toward the front car. I looked back and was relieved that the cat was not following us.

What did that dude on the train say to you? I asked after we’d gotten off at our stop.

Oh, nothing. He asked me if I knew how to get to this street, and when I told him I didn’t he asked me if I’d give him directions to the street where I lived. I was a little warm at first but it wasn’t worth getting excited about.

I guess I should have done something.

What could you have done? Sensing my feelings had been hurt, she said, I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. It’s just that because I’m with a man it goes without saying that he’s supposed to protect me from all men. I can appreciate that, but sometimes it slips my mind completely and I just go for myself. She giggled, covering her mouth with her hand. You know, I almost kicked that dude in his family jewels. I caught myself just in time. I guess that wouldn’t have made you look too good if I had. I probably would have been angry at you if you had tried to do something because you would’ve deprived me of the satisfaction. So don’t feel bad about not doing anything… Why are you looking at me like that?

Wasn’t that a blip? Here I was feeling I’d done too little on her behalf and she was holding back for fear she’d do too much. I got away from that woman in a hurry. About two years after the incident with Tonya I was called by the United States government to fulfill my military obligations by protecting it against all boogie men, both foreign and domestic. I didn’t realize it then, but I owe Tonya a debt of